Le père

I am a fan of Majid Majidi and have been watching his work in reverse chronological order. Much like other Iranian directors, his early work shows great promise and is very enjoyable, but is clearly not up to the standard of his later work.

Pedar is a good enough film, enjoyable story, fine acting, the usual nice settings and camera work from Majidi. However, where it falls below his later work in standard is (just like The Color of Paradise)the lack of subtlety and nuances in this film ; it is overly-emotional and arguably melodramatic in places. People show their emotions by shouting and screaming in this film, which is a slightly coarse way of portraying their feelings. Majidi's later works, such as the great Willow Tree, offer a greater depth.

A good film, which was followed by better ones.

The period when the West did not literally plunder the Middle East countries. The period in which original art was made comfortably in the Middle East. A movie that proves that a cliché story can turn into diamonds in the hands of a master. And Majid Majidi.

Pedar (The Father) by Majid Majidhi. An Iranian film. Like most of the Iranian films the story is simple but told with artistic touches. The adolescent son working for his family comes back and finds that his widowed mother remarried a policeman. She explains that she had to marry again for social security. But the boy who loved his father before the accident could not stomach a step father. With all Hamletian fury he hates his step father without finding out what sort of a person the step father is. He runs away and the stepfather searches for him and finds him. On their return journey they have to undergo hardships while traversing the desert and empathy builds up between them. Majidhi's touches are there in many scenes. The accident which killed the boys father was just shown with the scene of the accident. He also knows when to stop the narrative. The boy and the stepfather lie dehydrated over a stream,. The photograph of the stepfather with his mother and sisters drifts from the pocket of the stepfather and stops at the nose of the boy indicating reconciliation and the boy's discovery of a new father. And then the film ends. The best acting is by the mother - the anguish and suffering of a poor woman (whatever the culture they live in) who is torn between the love to the son and love to the man who kindly gave security to her in a traditional society and jas neem a good father to her children.

Of course I think Majidhi's other film "the children of heaven" is much better film – the story of how a bother and sister of a poor family share a pair of shoes between themselves.

Directed by Majid Majidi, who would later helm the better known Children of Heaven, this Iranian film is set in a working class milieu, and it tells the story of a teenage boy, who after his father is killed in a traffic accident, has to leave school and start working in order to support his family. He is proud of being, at such a young age, the person bringing the bread to his poor family. But things change when his widowed mother marries a police officer. He regards this as a double betrayal, and he tries to make life for his family impossible. After putting his two young sisters in jeopardy (in a domestic oven, in one of the film's best scenes), he flees to a port city. The policeman follows him, and in the road back they found themselves in the desert, in a final chase scene that is among the best thing I ever saw. Eventually, and in extremis, adoptive father and son reconciles. Perhaps the best thing of the movie is the portrayal of the policeman. His manners are a bit rough and unpolished, but in his heart he is a good man; it would have been much easier for the film to portray him as a monster, but happily this was avoided. Another triumph for the humanistic Iranian cinema that surprised the movie-watching world in the 1990s (and which sadly, right now, seems to be going through a bad time, hurt by renewed censorship in the Islamic republic).

Majid majidi is one among the favourite directors across the globe known for his natural simplicity & expressing the human emotions as realistic as possible...

The film explores a father-son relationship, emotional bonding in distress which reminds us that world is so large yet so small if you pick the right emotion...

The perfection is in the way the story is so simple that every movement,every word is gigantic, it echoes and leaves a impression in the mind,whileCinematography is so vivid unravels the various forms of human emotions and its necessity making the human a typical social beast who can't survive on his own...

Overall a must watch movie that falls under a category to watch out before every individual's lifetime...